Reducing Spam
Eliminating spam may seem like mission impossible with tens of billions of emails sent daily, however with a little work it is possible to greatly reduce the amount of spam you receive. In combination with our efforts to reduce spam, these methods will help to reclaim your inbox.
Ham vs. Spam
The first thing to clarify is whether you are receiving actual spam, or just ham. Spam is unsolicited email indiscriminately sent in bulk. Ham is email that was either directly or indirectly solicited. If you recently signed up for a service, and are seeing an increase in junk mail from similar networks, you may be experiencing ham. Often the best way to deal with ham is to be more rigid about who you give your email address to, and unsubscribe from those networks sending you advertising. If you are unsure if an email was solicited or unsolicited, assume it is spam and do not follow any links in it.
Eliminate it before delivery
We are always working to improve our spam filtering so the messages never reach your inbox. There are several methods you can use to improve upon our filtering methods. These methods do increase the risk of legitimate emails being classified as spam, so you should make changes over time. If you notice a decrease in legitimate emails one of these methods may be causing the problem, in which case you should remove it.
Configuring Anti-Spam Settings
Every email is assigned a score by the anti-spam systems, which is then evaluated based on your account settings. If the email scores too high it will be discarded as spam, otherwise it's delivered. You can change this setting in cPanel as follows, depending on the server configuration:
- Login to your SkyToaster Account
- Click My Services
- Click Manage for your Hosting Account
- Click cPanel or WHM under Login Into
- Under Email click Apache SpamAssassin or if present MailScanner
Apache SpamAssassin
Enable Apache SpamAssassin if you haven't already, this alone will help to reduce the amount of spam. We also recommend enabling Auto-Delete Spam, which works in conjunction with the Score.
The score is a value assigned to every email based on server rulesets. The higher the score the more likely a message is spam. You can increase or decrease the score based on how sensitive you want the spam filtering. Generally, messages scoring a 4 or higher are spam.
MailScanner
Enabled by default MailScanner can be refined to reduce the amount of spam received. We recommend setting High Scoring Spam to Delete instead of Deliver. You can then update the score for High and Low Scoring spam under Other settings.
Configuring Email Filters
In addition to SpamAssassin and MailScanner, you can also create your own email filters. These filters can be applied globally across your account or to one specific user. Global email filters can only be created in cPanel, where user filters can be created in the Webmail interface.
The filter creation process for users is the same as global filters. We suggest grouping similar rules under the same filter, to simplify management going forward. Care should be taken when creating filters, as emails could be lost depending on the action. If you receive a large amount of spam one filter you may consider adding is a "TLD" filter. These filters can be very effective at stopping spam using the same TLD.
Create a new filter with the name "TLD" or "TLD Spam". Our recommendation for the rules is to use "Any Header contains", and then for the rule body ".spamtld>" (without quotes). The system will search in the headers for that pattern. The period (.) and greater than sign (>) help to prevent false positives, for example creating a filter with just ".co" will also filter out all emails from .com. If you use ".co>" then any emails from .com or .co.uk for example would be unaffected.
